about
I live and work in the Harlem space that was for many years Mission Control for my website, Improvised Life. Though I'm no longer publishing it, its vast archive of ideas — on home and life design, and matters of the spirit and heart — remains available to explore. These days, life has me pursuing other things, but here's a look back at the work that got me here.
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I wrote three award-winning cookbooks designed to welcome cooks IN to improvising and finding their creative voice in the kitchen. It was the start of developing ways to help people improvise and break through their fears. A New Way to Cook was voted One of the Best Cookbooks of the Decade by The Guardian.
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Food styling is, at its very heart, improvising. I had to figure out how to put a milk mustache on celebrities for Annie Leibovitz, make pasta on-the-fly on a Venetian island for Christopher Baker, and gold leaf pears for Maria Robledo. Perhaps the most challenging was wrangling live snails to slide along the edge of an oyster for Irving Penn for a photograph in the Museum of Modern Art's collection...
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My work as a journalist took me into saffron fields in Spain... truffle hunting in France and Italy... documenting a rare culture in Appalachia. I had to FIND the story: following trails, one thing leading to another and another to essential sources and images. I contributed to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Food&Wine, Self and Saveur, and numerous books, and appeared on national TV and radio.
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For over twenty years, I was a contributor to public radio’s The Splendid Table where I talked about improvising in the kitchen and at table.
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I was the "conceptualist" and fabricator of an artist’s book collaboration that is in many rare book collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, SF MOMA and the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale. "The Onion As It Is Cooked" is a prose poem impressed in sheets of saffron pasta (instead of paper) by running it through a vintage letterpress. You can boil it up and eat the words! Read about it here.
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I created photography rental locations in Greenwich Village, Chelsea and Harlem that have been used in style books, magazine stories, videos and ads.
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Life is taking me in other directions... WOW!